Family Historian User Group

Hi
I have been having trouble saving my backup zip folders to my google cloud - it seems to just hang, and to my 32gb usb stick - it tells me there is no room even though there is lots when I check.
Whilst investigating I have noticed that the backup zip files seem to be the same size as the data they are compressing, see attachment. The left half of the picture shows the medium backup zip file for 12th Dec. The right half shows the same thing in the actual project. Is this as it should be? I have never really looked before.
I found some previous posts about something similar where Tatewise advised to check that part of the cache had not been included in the backup folder (can't remember which part) - it hasn't.
Chris

The cache file that should be excluded is ...\COMBINE Tree.fh_data\Cache\ThumbCache.dat.

The vast majority of your Project data by size is probably media JPG files that are already a compressed format, so ZIP compression cannot save much. There may be a great many text files that can be ZIP compressed, but they are comparatively small, so don't save much space.

Is your Google Drive full? It only allows 15 GB of storage for free.
Your medium backups are 2.75 GB and some full backups are over 5 GB, so Google Drive will only support three of those.
Remember that upload speeds to Google Drive are typically a tenth of download speeds. What broadband speed are you getting? If say only 2 M bits per sec then upload of 2.75 GB will take 3 hours if my maths is correct.

Can't explain the USB stick problem.

Hi,
Yes it is the thumbcache that is excluded. Thanks for the explanation re zip files, my media files must be at least 95% .jpg or .png so that makes sense to me.
I had another go at uploading to Google drive, at first the time was going to be correct according to the speed and at first the time reduced and the green circle increased. Then it was if it all started again, the time went up and up and the green almost disappeared. It kept doing this, going up and down, for hours till I gave up in the end. The upload speed was about 4bps all the time, but the download spend varied wildly, from about 40, right down to 3 at one time. (we weren't logged onto to anything else at the time, as far as we know anyway).
But all is not lost as I had another go today at sending it to my usb stick and it worked perfectly, took about 2 minutes. So I think I will stick with the usb stick! As I said before I do save all my work to a separate hard drive as well as my pc so this was just a belt and braces job really.
Many thanks for your help,
Chris

I'm glad you had some success.
With an upload speed of only 4M bits per sec then sending to any cloud store will be challenging with such large files and will take hours.